Rhino Puzzlings

Turmoil, upset, and no shortage of sturm und drang this week among the indie publishing community (i.e., self-pubbers like yr humble rhino.) Draft2Digital announced they they were no longer going to be allowing purely free signup and support: new accounts will be charged $20 setup, and sales must meet or exceed $100 annually or else the account is charged $12. Barnes & Noble has a similar, albeit less spelled out policy that accounts not meeting standards could be knifed. Amazon, as of this writing, has been mum, but Amazon also has incredibly deep pockets. They can--and I suspect do--lose money on their self-publishing platform, and it's barely a mote in their financial eye. But boy, it was like D2D announced they'd be puppy-stomping, and indie authors would be funding it. What happened? I'm speculating that it's the general issue of scale . When books took a while to produce, D2D naturally did not get as many uploaded to their service to distribute, and they bot...

I maintain a presence on Reddit (yeah I know), and sometimes try to pass along bits of writing advice culled from a few years of personal fumbling around/practice. These often involve a fictional title Rise of the Were-Chicken which is a genre-crossing piece of imagination, adjusting to the question at hand. It's the most adaptable book I'll never write. Social media is still awful, but for the moment it's still largely humans, and creators need to stick together. For those who avoid that particular hive of villainy, I'll occasionally repost (and expand) on my opinions.

Continuing a theme from last time , where fraud is attempted upon yr humble rhino correspondent. Principle cast: 🧛 —the scammer du jour 🧩🦏 — the would-be victim 🚩 — private internal snark Episode IV: In the Spotlight 🚩: On the very day I push out @TheRealJoyG, I receive a DM from someone representing themselves as an author. The profile is new-ish and what I consider all "cover vomit." No real material, just the same cover assets over and over. Someone has put in some work on making it look professional and/or amateurish. The "author" web site links to Instagram and other social media there's Amazon reviews, etc.. It could be another hobbyist writer, and I take the stance of "innocent until proven guilty" albeit with a high dose of skepticism. This connection comes out of the blue from someone in a totally different genre. Do you have a lot of free time to DM random people? No? Why would a best-selling author (his words) ...

I'm finally getting back to revisions on  Trouble , the next story queued up on the assembly line for release. I sent it out for a round of beta feedback and am now making a pass to incorporate suggestions and look for enhancement opportunities  which is a kindly way of stating "places where I read the draft and go... what was I thinking?" The passage of time is a clarifying tool for certain. I'm actually enjoying it now, reuniting with this title after it had been suspended for a while. The clear eyes of editing don't come as easily to me when I am staring at it all the time. I hope also that this is my growth as a writer, slow and awkward as that process may be. I wrote three drafts of  Trouble , and the story evolved dramatically among each, from the initial setting in time, to the nature of the protagonist and the deuteragonist (a term I'm still learning), to the consequences of their actions. I kept approaching the story from new angles, trying to determi...

It's rewrite time. I'm making the prose more purposefully purple in  One Last Quest , my rewrite of my 2012 self-publishing adventure, trying to keep the howling Inner Critic out of the process while the Creator piece gets to roam around again. I'm still shocked at the  thinness  of this book, not just physically, but also in terms of characters and such-as-it-is plot. I'm not trying to be unkind to myself here, but on a re-read it feels much like those classic animation processes, where a background layer is moved along one step at a time as each character cel is placed atop it and photographed. I remember writing it initially, and retyping and refining it, and being bothered by the pace of change. Like animation, it was difficult to imagine the final product while focusing on the incremental steps. I've been working on developing out the characters lately, giving them motivations and goals and trying to add depth and purpose to make them more than a shallow, colo...

 The more I've learned of writing, the less organized I've become, and for that, I'm grateful. When I first started writing, I didn't have any direction beyond  don't let the inner critic get you down  (sound advice) but I still had no idea to how to structure anything longer than an essay, or more enduring than a joke. My first attempt at writing anything of length was a mercifully-forgotten adventure story, with a cast of around a half dozen irregular, quirky characters who would move around within the irregular, quirky plot. I had an idea of a Rashomon -style retelling of the story, within the framing device of a court case, told in flashbacks that would "dissolve" to the story as it happened. It was... ambitious. And I had a plot, of sorts, and an objective, of a kind, but what I lacked was experience, guidance, and notably: deep characters. I don't mean  deep  as in thoughtful or introspective, but deep as in "not thin or shallow." There...